Parted is a famous command line tool that allows you to easily manage hard disk partitions. It can help you add, delete, shrink and extend disk partitions along with the file systems located on them. Parted has gone a long way from when it first came out. Some of it’s functions have been removed, others have been added.

Parted Command to Manage Linux Disk Partitions

In this tutorial you will learn the basics of parted and we will show you some practical examples. If you don’t have any previous experience with parted, please be aware that parted writes the changes immediately to your disk, so be careful if you try to modify your disk partitions.

If you plan on testing parted, the better option would be to simply use a virtual machine or old computer/laptop without any valuable information on it. To make modifications on a disk partition it must not be in use. If you need to work on primary partition, you may boot into rescue mode.

Note: You will need to have root access to the machine you will be working on in order to use parted.

How to Install Parted on Linux

On many Linux distributions, parted comes pre-installed. If it is not included in your distro, you can install it with:

Once you have make sure that parted is installed, you can proceed further to check out some real world examples of parted command in the rest of this article.

1. Check Parted Version

Run the following command, you see message similar to the one shown on the image below. Don’t worry if your parted version is different. Unless specified otherwise, parted will use your primary drive, which in most cases will be /dev/sda.

$ parted

Check Parted Command Version

If you want to exit parted, simply type:

$ quit

2. List Linux Disk Partitions

Now that parted is started, let’s list the partitions of the selected hard disk. As mentioned earlier, parted chooses your first drive by default. To see the disk partitions run print.

(parted) print

Check Linux Partitions

When running print, it will also display the hard disk information and model. Here is example from a real hard disk (not virtual as shown on the image above) :

In the example above, you can see the disk model, capacity sector size and partition table.

3. List or Switch to Different Disk

If you have more than one hard disk, you can easily switch between disks, by using the “select” command. In the example below, I will switch from /dev/sda to /dev/sdb which is a secondary drive on my system.

To easily switch between disks you can use:

(parted) select /dev/sdX

Select Different Disk

Change "X" with the letter of the disk to which you wish to switch.

4. Create Primary or Logical Partition in Linux

Parted can be used to create primary and logical disk partitions. In this example, I will show you how to create primary partition, but the steps are the same for logical partitions.

To create new partition, parted uses “mkpart“. You can give it additional parameters like "primary" or "logical" depending on the partition type that you wish to create.

Before you start creating partitions, it’s important to make sure that you are using (you have selected) the right disk.

Start by using print:

(parted) print

Show Current Linux Disk

As shown on the above image, we are using a virtual drive of 34 GB. First we will give the new disk a label and then create a partition and set a file system on it.

Next, exit parted with "quit" command. We will format our new partition in ext4 file system using mkfs. To make this happen run the following command:

# mkfs.ext4 /dev/sdb1

Note: It’s important to select the right disk and partition when executing the above command!

Now let’s verify our results, by printing the partition table on our secondary disk. Under file system column, you should see ext4 or the file system type that you have decided to use for your partition:

Verify Disk Partition Filesystem

5. Resize Linux Disk Partition

Parted includes multiple useful functions and one of them is "resizepart". As you have probably figured this out by now, "resizepart" helps you resize a partition.

In the example below, you will see how to resize an existing partition. For the purpose of this example, we will be using the earlier created partition.

First you will need to know the number of the partition that you will be resizing. This can be easily found by using "print":

(parted) print

Find Linux Partition Number

In our example, the partition number is "1". Now run the resizepart command:

(parted) resizepart

You will be asked for the number of the partition that you will resize. Enter it’s number. After that, you will be asked to set the new ending point for this partition. Remember that by default the units are in MB. In our example, we have set the new partition size to 15 GB:

(parted) resizepart
Partition number? 1
End? [10.0GB]? 15000

Now verify the results with "print":

(parted) print

Verify Linux Resize Partition

6. Delete Linux Partition

The next thing you will learn is how to delete a partition from your hard drive. To do this, you will need to use the "rm" command within parted. To delete a disk partition you will need to know it’s number.

As mentioned earlier, you can easily obtain this number by using "print". In our example, we will delete the partition with number 1 from our secondary drive /dev/sdb1:

(parted) rm 1

Verify the results by printing the partitions table:

Delete a Linux Partition

7. Rescue Linux Disk Partition

Parted supports a “rescue" utility that helps you recover a lost partition between a starting and ending point. If a partition is found within that range, it will attempt to restore it.

8 Change Linux Partition Flag

Using parted, you can change the state of a flag for disk partitions. The supported flags are:

boot

root

swap

hidden

raid

lvm

lba

legacy_boot

irst

esp

palo

The states can be either "on" or "off". To change a flag simply run "set" command within parted:

(parted) set 2 lba on

The above command sets lba flag to on for second partition. Verify the results with print:

Change Partition Flag

Conclusion

Parted is a useful and powerful utility that can help you manage your disk partitions in Linux systems. As always, when working with disk partitions you need to be extra careful. It is strongly recommend to go through parted man pages to learn how you can customize it’s output and find more information about its capabilities.

If you have any questions or comments, please do not hesitate to use the comment section below.

I am a bachelor in computer science and a Linux Foundation Certified System Administrator. Currently working as a Senior Technical support in the hosting industry. In my free time I like testing new software and inline skating.

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I tried to resize my primary partition and it worked, the only problem i run into now is that linux thinks the whole partition is full but I know it’s all free space… How can I allocate this free space on my HD into the primary partition and use it as free space?

Do you mean that the new partition is showed as allocated? If the whole partition is free, did you try to format it? Alternatively, you may try to run resize2fs on the partition you are resizing and see if this resolves the issue for you.